1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a harvesting apparatus for row crops and, more particularly, to an apparatus for cutting tobacco plants.
2. Brief Description of Prior Art
The harvesting of tobacco has always been a costly and time-consuming operation. Tobacco leaves must be handled very carefully to prevent bruising or damaging the leaves in harvesting. Damaged or bruised leaves do not produce high quality tobacco when cured and to the present Inventor's knowledge, no harvesting machinery has yet been developed which is capable of efficiently cutting the plant without causing damage to a substantial proportion of the crop that is harvested. For these reasons, substantially all of the tobacco which is harvested throughout the world is harvested manually, with the result that the labor costs involved in harvesting the product are very substantial. In addition, this type of manual labor is extremely unpleasant and an adequate labor force to perform this type of operation is not readily available.
As will be seen from the subsequent description, the preferred embodiments of the present invention overcome disadvantages of the prior art.